President Barack Obama may have delivered the most cynical, divisive speech of his political career on Wednesday. That’s quite a feat for a man who has made a virtue of sowing discord while simultaneously congratulating himself for remaining dispassionately above the political fray. But the president’s graceless agitation on Wednesday in support of his legacy achievement that, as a side note, purports to address the threat of Iranian nuclear weapons might also reflect his sense that the ground beneath him is starting to soften. The longer Americans are exposed to this deal, the less they support it. The members of Congress Obama needs to back this proposal with their votes might also be starting to get cold feet.
Gone was the buoyantly optimistic President Obama who was so eager to field questions about the Iran nuclear deal after it was initially announced that he went so far as to ask them of himself. In his place was a defiant and battered President Obama. The man who spoke at American University on Wednesday was a grim reminder of the president Americans saw just prior to the 2014 midterm elections; a portrait of a man enduring the censure of an ungrateful nation, a man deeply resentful of the task before him and bitter toward those who had bound him to do it.
Obama wasted little time rehearsing rote recitations of the aspects of the deal that he has said will render Iran unable to develop a nuclear weapon. Instead, almost from the beginning of the address, the president took the modern left on a retrospective tour of their ideological origin story: their opposition to the Iraq War.
Obama warned that those who oppose the Iran nuclear deal are virtually the same individuals and organizations that supported the invasion of Iraq. It was a cultural touchstone for the audience to which he was appealing, and little elaboration was required. Out of generosity of spirit, however, the president continued:
“Today, Iraq remains gripped by sectarian conflict, and the emergence of al-Qaida in Iraq has now evolved into ISIL,” Obama insisted. “And ironically, the single greatest beneficiary in the region of that war was the Islamic Republic of Iran, which saw its strategic position strengthened by the removal of its long-standing enemy, Saddam Hussein.” Once again, the president implied, he was cleaning up a mess left for him by his predecessor.
It is the height of arrogance for the president to blame the conditions in Iraq and Syria that he invited through fecklessness and inattention on the Iran deal’s opponents. This is the Iraq that Obama said in 2008 had been pacified by a surge strategy that was successful “beyond our wildest dreams.” It was the Iraq Obama boasted America was leaving “sovereign, stable, and self-reliant,” and “with a representative government” in 2010. “I think it’s going to be one of the great achievements of this administration,” the vice president bragged as recently as 2011. “You’re going to see a stable government in Iraq that is actually moving toward a representative government.”
But Obama wasn’t interested in intellectual consistency on Wednesday. He had come to stir the pot.
“Just because Iranian hardliners chant ‘Death to America’ does not mean that that’s what all Iranians believe,” the president said in defense of Iranian hardliners. “In fact, it’s those hardliners who are most comfortable with the status quo. It’s those hardliners chanting ‘Death to America’ who have been most opposed to the deal. They’re making common cause with the Republican Caucus.” This familiar bloody tunic had the intended effect on the president’s audience of true believers.
For a president who is so enamored with his own commitment to civility and rejection of cynicism, this was a profoundly uncivil and cynical assessment of his opponents. It also cemented the impression that Obama wasn’t trying to build up any more support for the Iran deal domestically or in Congress. What Obama came to do was to campaign, to agitate, and to hector the left into supporting this deal and his presidency purely out of partisan zeal and their spitefulness toward Republicans. Obama came to fire up his far-left base voters and to mobilize them to action.
Only that explains why the president would so insouciantly admit that Iranian-backed forces have in the past and are presently engaged in financing terrorist activities across the region. It explains why he would admit that Iran supported fighters who were responsible for the deaths of hundreds of American soldiers in Iraq. It explains why he wouldn’t care if the headline to emerge from his speech was “Obama admits some unfrozen Iran cash will fund ‘terrorist activities,’” as the Agence France-Presse reported. It explains why Obama so breezily confessed that his administration courted the Iranian regime as early as 2009, and in the process allowed the Green Revolution to be brutally suppressed by the Islamist regime in Tehran. It wasn’t the headlines in the Washington Post that mattered now, but those in Vox.com, Talking Points Memo, and Daily Kos.
“I know it’s easy to play in people’s fears, to magnify threats,” the president added. He most certainly does. Moments later, Obama added that, if Congress were to reject the Iran deal, the United States “will have lost something more precious: America’s credibility as a leader of diplomacy.” Moreover, “The choice we face is ultimately between diplomacy or some form of war.”
“My fellow Americans, contact your representatives in Congress,” Obama concluded. Republicans should welcome Obama’s request. Every member of Congress deserves an uncomfortable summer recess as they contemplate their vote on this nuclear deal alongside their constituents back home. While Republicans debate its merits, the president goes about dramatically insisting that Democrats will be betraying their foundational beliefs, the most formative convictions of their youths, and, most critically, himself if they were to vote against it. While defeating this proposal is still an uphill fight, the momentum appears to be shifting all to one side.
